#297:  L’IMAGINATION AU POUVOIR!   It all began in Nanterre, a western suburb where the University of Paris had set up a new campus in response to overcrowding.  Contemporary descriptions make it sound like a bit of a hole—it’s now part of La Defense, described as “Europe’s largest purpose-built business district,”—and in 1963 there had been a ruckus when police shot and killed Nahel Merzouk, a French student of Algerian descent, in circumstances which recall nothing so much as the recent ICE killing of Renée Good.  In March of 1968 some students occupied an administration building of the University, in part to protest the Vietnam war and in part to agitate for permission to sleep in each others’ dorm rooms.  On May 3^rd  other students, to support the protesters at Nanterre, occupied a building of the Sorbonne and got routed out, quite brutally, by the Paris police; four hundred students were arrested, and night-long rioting took place.  That was the match to the tinder.  In the days following, some 600 barricades went up around the Latin Quarter, cobblestone streets got pulled up (“Under the paving stones, the beach!” was one of the resounding cries of the events), trees uprooted and cars overturned.  Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, in their book When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968, give a vivid account of how things, far from fizzling out, began to snowball.  Renault plant workers left their jobs and marched in support; truck drivers disrupted deliveries of goods and blockaded highways and city borders.  Both the Gaullist and the Communist party structures—seen as the poles of political possibility in France—were derided and dismissed as petrified and worse than useless.  The impassible professional barriers between workers and bosses were attacked.  In a matter of weeks support for the strikes, an unprecedented alliance of students and workers, included as many as ten million people.  Across much of France, not just in Paris, people heard the screeching noises of an entire social system grinding to a halt.

       One of the pleasures of reading When Poetry Ruled the Streets, aside from its patient reconstruction of events and intelligent picking through the massive records of the time, is getting some sense of the dizzying optimism—the sense that something, somehow, was going to change—and the resourcefulness and invention of the strikers.  The students were unusual, maybe unique, in linking revolution to imagination.  They coined provocative and impertinent mottoes: ANSWER EXAMS WITH QUESTIONS.  WE WANT A WORLD, NEW AND ORIGINAL. RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU. WE REFUSE A WORLD WHERE THE ASSURANCE OF NOT DYING FROM HUNGER IS EXCHANGED FOR THE RISK OF DYING OF BOREDOM.  Most famously: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID.  The Ecole des Beaux Arts got taken over and, as the Atelier Populaire, produced 500,000 free serigraph posters from some 700 designs.  Every public building in Paris became a billboard.  News videos of the time, still retrievable online, show an ongoing sea of commotion and confrontation: students with bullhorns, streets dismantled, marching lines of policemen with truncheons, young people with bloodied faces, and smoke, billowing up everywhere, surrounding everyone.  

        Then: nothing.

        At the end of June the Gaullist party, and de Gaulle himself, were returned decisively to office.  The whole disruption was declared a bad business, and now officially over.  The occupiers got booted out pronto. The workers dragged themselves back to the factories.  (“Retour a la normale,” was one poster’s Parthian shot, showing a stylized flock of sheep.)  The students were decried as spoiled middle-class children, their demands as fatuously idealistic and impractical.  The reelected Gaullist government banned radical organizations and muzzled the state media system and its narrative of the events.  Raymond Aron wrote that May ‘68 produced only “a utopian negation of reality.”  It “failed to demonstrate that the self-governance of companies, universities, society, the end of hierarchies, and the abolition of separation between the masses and the decision makers, offered a radically original third way, something between a liberal Sovietism and a social-inclined capitalism.”  Agnes Poirier later argued that the movement’s feminist sentiments were “more often than not used by heterosexual men as a right to collect female lovers” (an argument I heard echoed at college in the U.S.).  The FHAR, a group agitating for gay rights that followed the ‘68 movement, vanished into a haze of infighting by 1976.  Thrown from those head-spinning heights of the possible, it was a particularly brutal cutting-short, and it inflicted one more sore spot, one more point of argument, in the French psyche. (The French have very stubborn memories: I once sat at a Paris luncheon that almost came to blows over L’Affaire, the Dreyfus court-martial in 1894.)

       So….nothing.  Nothing?

       Maybe not.  A November referendum, the Faure Law, radically changed the rigid French university system and allowed for increased student participation.  A substantial hike in the minimum wage was passed, and the rights of trade unions to organize and operate within business workplaces became law.  As mentioned, abortion and contraception became legally available; the gay rights movement eventually got to its feet and carried on.  And within a year, to the shock of everyone, the long-reigning giant of French government, who had seemed as stubbornly ensconced as Franco, lumbered begrudgingly away: in April of 1969 Charles de Gaulle resigned.  One of the most pungent of the ‘68 mottoes was “Papa pue” (“Daddy stinks.”), and there was no question who it referred to.

       Perhaps the subtlest approach to the contradictions and apparent failures of ‘68 came from Jean-Luc Nancy, a philosopher at the University of Strasbourg.  He wrote that the reason there was no possible legacy of ’68 was because, in effect, ’68 never really ended.  Its true mission and importance had been to alert people that “society was changing, that the order had been broken … The course of history, of progress, of human emancipation, rational and in control of its own destiny, had been somehow diverted…. The ’68 events were even more metaphysical and spiritual than they were social, political and cultural. The heart of the matter, those days’ incandescence, lies in the mutation that was taking place in western civilization.”  Nancy suggested that the movement was gradually absorbed into the way people thought, worked, and related, by opening their ideas as to what might be possible.  What other social movement, however short-lived, ever cried, “L’imagination au pouvoir!” (“Power to the imagination!”)? This is revolution as seen not by Engels or Marx but by Blake, who of course by worldly standards failed, dying in poverty, or Whitman, another mere poet.  Nancy suggested that we are still finding our way, which is certainly true; but by whose light, whose incandescence, do we better find our way, than by the imagination, the arts, poetry?  Perhaps, following them, something like poetry might actually one day rule the streets, however unlikely any time soon. You never know.  “The act institutes the consciousness,” strikers wrote on the walls, but maybe the reverse is also true.  “The Revolution must take place in men before taking place in things”—this is not a cry not to committees or the social theorists or the political left or right, but, finally, to the mills of the gods.

       This is why the perhaps most vivid and moving record of May ‘68 is in the book Beauty is in the Street: A Visual Record of the May ‘68 Paris Uprising, edited by Johan Kugeberg and Philippe Vermés, published by Four Corners Books.  Kugeberg and Vermés lay their cards on the table right off the bat, quoting as a frontispiece words from the posters’ designers:  “Their rightful place is in the centres of conflict, that is to say in the streets and on the walls of the factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect.  This is why the Atelier Populaire has always refused to put them on sale.”  And yet these stark, instantly readable designs obviously came from artists of considerable skill, and their arresting, lightning-quick effectiveness could not have been accidental.  Here, as much as in any of the manifestos, any of the written statements, we really do see the imagination come to power.  The cover design, bright red on a bare white background, an image of a young woman hurling a brick, and above and below her, the words “La beauté est dans la rue,” is an ecstatic image of the anger, the energy and the hope that was in the students’ rejection of the stagnating life around them.  The book has texts and a timeline and maps and, for the monolingual, English translations of the posters’ captions, but they all cede to the page after page, image after image, of the students’ yawp of indignation, their refusals, conveyed with the ingenuity of the incensed.  As the world always gives fresh cause for that indignation, what these images teach us, what the students were telling us in May ‘68, really has never ended.  “La lutte continue.”  The work goes on.  “Sous les pavés, la plage!” “Under the paving stones, the beach1” 

--When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968, by Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman.  State University of New York Press, 2001.

--“May ‘68: What Legacy?” by Agnes Poirier.  Paris Review, May 1, 2018.

--Beauty is in the Streets: A Visual Record of the May ‘68 Paris Uprising, edited by Johan Kugeberg and Philippe Vermés.  Four Corners Press, 2011.